... I warn this honorable House that any proposal to inflict billions of dollars of new taxation on all citizens by charging selectively-disfavored industries for arbitrarily-rationed permits to emit a harmless and beneficial trace gas that is necessary to all life on Earth and has little effect on its surface temperature will fall cruelly and disproportionately upon the poor, will threaten their very lives, will gravely diminish the liberty that is the glory of your great nation, will render difficult if not unlawful the pursuit of happinessy ...

House Committee on Ways and Means

Statement of Lord Christopher Monckton, Chief Policy Advisor, Science and Public Policy Institute

Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support of the House Committee on Ways and Means

March 12, 2009

As a Prime Ministerial policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher, inter alia I modeled the economic interactions of taxes and benefits on low-income households with the aim of eradicating poverty, and investigated scientific frauds. I have written and lectured about the mathematics and physics of climate sensitivity. I advise institutions on climate change.

I warn this honorable House that any proposal to inflict billions of dollars of new taxation on all citizens by charging selectively-disfavored industries for arbitrarily-rationed permits to emit a harmless and beneficial trace gas that is necessary to all life on Earth and has little effect on its surface temperature will fall cruelly and disproportionately upon the poor, will threaten their very lives, will gravely diminish the liberty that is the glory of your great nation, will render difficult if not unlawful the pursuit of happiness, will raise little net revenue if the poor are adequately compensated by subsidy, will damagingly distort the labor market by widening and deepening the unemployment trap that already gives millions of your most helpless citizens a better income on welfare than in work, will imprison the poorest earners in a perpetual poverty trap by inflicting upon them a crippling marginal taxation and benefit-withdrawal rate that powerfully deters them from increasing their earnings, will be complex, extravagant, and costly, will savagely compound the adverse effects of recession, of excessive public and private indebtedness, of fiscal incontinence, and of monetary laxity on industries and employment, will create soi-disant “green” jobs by the thousand while destroying real jobs by the million, will establish an unstable and artificial derivatives market in hot air that will enrich a handful of portly middle-men while impoverishing the people, will automatically and ineluctably defeat its own objective by so depressing economic activity that the “market” price of carbon dioxide will tend rapidly to fall as close to zero as it has done in both of Europe’s attempts at a cap-and-trade scheme, will directly encourage fraud by incentivizing not only both parties to every transaction but also the regulatory authorities recklessly to overstate the magnitude of that transaction, will set your enterprises at a profound competitive disadvantage against nations that steer wisely clear of purposeless restrictions on or taxation of the very air we breathe out, will accelerate the transfer of wealth from your citizens’ pockets to other nations’ governments by way of boondoggles such as the UN’s “Clean Development Mechanism”, and will appreciably increase global carbon-dioxide emissions by transferring US jobs and manufactures to less efficient nations whose emissions per unit of production are many times greater than your own, and by increasing poverty and consequently birth-rates and consequently carbon-dioxide emissions worldwide, thereby exerting at prodigious and tragic cost a double influence on the global climate that will be precisely the opposite of that which was, however piously, intended.

Any restriction on the emission of carbon dioxide is unnecessary. It is simple to establish theoretically, and has been so established, that the UN’s climate panel has exaggerated the true effect of carbon dioxide enrichment on global temperature sevenfold. To confirm that theoretical result it is simple to verify empirically, and has been so verified by direct and repeated satellite observation, that the diminution over time in the outgoing long-wave radiation from the Earth is one-seventh of that which the UN’s computer games had been instructed to predict. Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the air at less than half the rate the UN had imagined. Not one of its games had predicted the rapid global cooling of the past seven years. Sea surface temperatures have fallen for five years. Sea level has not risen for three years, and is predicted to rise by little more than a foot this century. Worldwide hurricane intensity in October 2008 was at its least for 30 years. Global sea ice shows little trend in 30 years. The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are thickening. The Sahara is greening. There is no “climate crisis”. The correct policy response to the non-problem of “global warming” is not to cap or tax carbon dioxide emissions. It is to have the courage to do nothing.

Click here to view additional supporting graphs.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.